The man of many faces — every man's face and every woman's — who holds the book of all thoughts, knows what everyone is thinking, and can change any mind to any position.
Dantalion appears as a man with many faces — all men's faces and all women's faces — holding a book in his right hand. The description is among the Goetia's most conceptually charged: not one face but many, not the faces of one gender but of both, not carrying a weapon or a natural creature but a book. Dantalion's appearance encodes his powers directly in his form: the man who knows all thoughts carries the book of those thoughts; the man who can change any mind wears all minds' faces simultaneously.
The many-faced form is unique in the Goetia — no other spirit presents with multiple simultaneous faces. The closest analogue in the broader tradition is Janus (two-faced) or certain representations of the divine that show multiple simultaneous aspects. But Dantalion's multiplicity is not the duality of Janus or the triply-faced Hecate — it is a genuine multitude, all men's faces and all women's, the complete human population's visages assembled into a single form. Dantalion looks like everyone and therefore looks like no one in particular: the face of the universal human thought-reader is the face of universal humanity itself.
The book he carries is the record of all thoughts — the text that contains everything everyone has ever thought, the grimoire of the human interior. The book as an object encodes what Dantalion is: not an agent who extracts information by force but a being who already has the record, who holds in his right hand the complete transcript of human mental life. The book is already written; Dantalion already knows what it says. The conjurer who invokes him is asking a being who has already read the complete text to share a specific passage.
Seventy-one is a prime — the last prime in the Goetia's catalogue, the penultimate spirit, the final irreducible before Andromalius's closing Earl. The man of many faces at the last prime: the irreducible intelligence who knows all thoughts, standing just before the spirit who punishes those who steal and deceive. Knowledge and justice as the final pair of the seventy-two.
Dantalion holds three powers of extraordinary psychological scope: all arts and sciences, knowledge of all persons' secret thoughts, and the ability to change those thoughts to whatever the conjurer desires. He is the Goetia's supreme psychological operator — the being who knows everyone's interior and can alter it at will, who teaches everything the mind can learn and then demonstrates his mastery of the mind by changing what it contains.
The three powers are structurally unified: Dantalion knows all arts (the content of all thought), knows all secret thoughts (the current state of all minds), and can change those thoughts (alter that current state to a new configuration). He is the complete operator of the human interior — the reader and writer of the text that is the mind. The book he carries contains the read text; his power of thought-change is the writing instrument that can revise it. He is the author of the book he holds, and can revise any passage the conjurer specifies.
The power to know all secret thoughts is theologically the most significant claim in the Goetia. In the Christian tradition within which the Lemegeton was compiled, the knowledge of all secret thoughts was an attribute of God alone — the omniscience that only the divine possessed, the penetrating knowledge of the interior that no human and no created being could claim. That Dantalion possesses this attribute is a theological statement of considerable boldness: the seventy-first spirit of the fallen hierarchy holds a power that orthodox tradition reserved for the Creator.
The implications of universal thought-access are staggering at the social as well as the theological level. Human social life is predicated on the privacy of thought — the assumption that what is not spoken cannot be known, that the interior remains hidden unless disclosed. Dantalion's power eliminates this privacy entirely: his many faces look at every face and see through it into the thought behind it, reading the book that every person carries internally but cannot be made to show. The social world built on the privacy of the interior collapses the moment Dantalion opens his book at the relevant page.
The thought-changing power is the inverse of the thought-knowing power and equally radical. If knowing all thoughts is divine omniscience, changing any thought is divine will — the power to alter what is most fundamentally one's own, the interior state that defines who one is from the inside. Dantalion can make someone love who they did not love, desire what they did not desire, believe what they did not believe. He is not merely reading the book; he is revising it. The editor of the human interior, at the conjurer's direction.
The name Dantalion (also rendered as Dantalion in most manuscripts, with unusual stability for such a late catalogue entry) has been connected by some researchers to the Greek dantelos (clear, manifest) combined with aion (age, eternity) — the eternal clarity of all that has ever been thought, the transparent record of infinite human mental life. Others propose connections to various proper name traditions. The name's stability across manuscripts suggests it was transmitted with relative confidence, as if the scribal tradition knew this name clearly and reproduced it accurately.
Dantalion is the Goetia's great spirit of the human interior — the penultimate intelligence of the seventy-two, standing at the last prime before closure, carrying the book that contains everything anyone has ever thought. He is invoked for the knowledge of what others are thinking, for the changing of minds and the causing of love, and for the complete intellectual curriculum that the being who has read all thought naturally possesses. The man of many faces at the last prime is the spirit of the complete human mind — its content (all arts and sciences), its current state (all secret thoughts) and its malleability (thoughts changed to whatever is desired). The book he carries is the book of the interior that all seventy-two spirits, in their different ways, have circled throughout the catalogue — and Dantalion holds it in his right hand, open, at the page the conjurer needs.